No Such Thing As A Fish - 386: No Such Thing As Enough Bathtubs
Episode Date: August 13, 2021Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss flying urine, sinking floaters, Keaton and Kazakhstan. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. ...
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi everybody, Andy here just with a quick exciting announcement before this week's
episode of Fish Begins which is that we are going on tour.
If you haven't seen this already we are heading around the entire UK and Ireland with our
tour Nerd Immunity.
It's going to be so much fun, we're going to be stopping off all over the place.
Think of a town near you, we're probably playing it.
Names to stir the imagination, chill the blood.
Things like Peterborough, Barnstable, Chesterfield, Birmingham, Ipswich, Canterbury, we're doing
a whole raft in Scotland, we're doing Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen, we're going
to Cardiff, we're going to Belfast and Dublin, we're playing the London Palladium itself.
We cannot wait, every single show we're going to be doing a brand new podcast in the second
half and there will as always be a first half stuffed with stupidity, facts, us teasing
down about the Mongolian death worm, you name it, it's going to be in the show.
We cannot wait to be out there and we really hope to see you there.
We know that it may feel strange being in a theatre, a room with actual other people,
but we cannot wait and we're looking forward to it.
So if you would like to come and see Nerd Immunity all you have to do is go to qi.com slash fish
events, see which is the nearest to you and snap up your ticket now.
Alright, on with the show.
Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming
to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Streiber, I am sitting at a great distance from Anna Tyshinski, Andrew
Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with
our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with fact number one, that is Andy.
My fact is that for the 1921 Buster Keaton film The Boat, two prop boats were built,
one designed to float and one designed to sink.
Unfortunately, the one meant to float persistently sank and the one designed to sink repeatedly
stayed afloat.
Okay, I have a question, why didn't they just relabel them?
You know what, you would have been much use on this film, James, absolutely.
It's so weird, it's such a weird story.
This is from a book called Buster Keaton's Silent Shorts.
The film is The Boat, there was a boat in it called Damn Fino and the movie's technical
director was a guy called Fred Gabburi and he built two boats and there were different
shots to be filmed basically and yeah, the one which was designed to sink, refused to
sink, it had several holes bored into it, it had a broken stern, deliberately broken
stern and 1600 pounds of dead iron weight in it, it just would not sink, stayed afloat
and the floater on the other hand just repeatedly sank and it had to be stuffed with pumps all
the way through the bottom of it to keep it afloat.
Has anyone seen The Boat?
I haven't actually, Anna has.
Yes, I have and it's dated.
I will say it's dated.
Really?
Okay.
But it's perfectly good.
I do think that it's probably pronounced Damn Fino, the boat, although obviously you
don't hear them say it, but there is.
Did they rhyme it with Rhino halfway through the film in a note?
Is that how you know?
It's really similar.
At one point when they're sinking and they're about to drown, they call the Coast Guard
and they say, I'm on this boat and the Coast Guard says, what's it called?
And they say, Damn Fino and the Coast Guard mishears it as Damn Defino and it's a hilarious
exchange of missing stands.
Very good.
So back then that would have killed just because misunderstandings have been ploughed to death
in comedy since.
You've got to put yourself a hundred years back and go, wow, that's the first misunderstanding
that's ever happened.
Do you remember that ever where I think it's for a beer?
It's the sailors radioing into a coastal station or something and they're saying, help, help,
we're sinking, we're sinking and it's a German guy on the receiving end and he says, listen
to this, we're sinking, we're sinking and he says, yes, what are you thinking about?
No, that's a good joke.
That's a classic.
So he's about how you deliver it, I'm just not sure they nailed the delivery in this.
In the silent comedy.
I watched another movie this week, which was The General, which is one of his big ones.
Although at the time it got very bad reviews because it's a movie where he plays someone
in the South during the Civil War and all the reviewers were from the North and they
thought that he was kind of giving some kind of skewed version of history where actually
the people who were in the South were heroes who were kind of a little bit misunderstood
and maybe they should have won the war after all and stuff like that.
But actually Buster Keaton, he was part of this kind of weird, I would say conspiracy,
but there was almost like a cult of people believing that the South was badly done to
in the Civil War.
The story sounds really cool of The General because it's based on a true Civil War story
and the idea was there were Unionist spies in the South and they decided to basically
hijack a train and the idea was they hijack a Southern train and they take over it and
then they speed it along towards Chattanooga, which I like even though the Chattanooga choo-choo
is totally unrelated to this train by coincidence, speed it towards Chattanooga and it's like
a reverse Wallace and Gromit because they're tearing up the rail and all the telegraph
positive stuff behind it.
Every scene you look at it and you think this could be Wallace and Gromit.
Yeah, it is amazing.
Because the scene, one of Buster Keaton's most famous stunts is where there's a huge
sleeper lying across the track, a huge log of wood basically and he's holding a huge
sleeper in his hands.
He's sitting on the cowcatcher at the front of the train and he has to throw a sleeper
which is like tossing the caber basically at the other sleeper to knock it off the track.
It's a real shot.
The train is actually moving.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
And he manages it.
Honestly, I watched it this week.
It was made in 1927 and I didn't know it was going to happen and I just went, whoa.
It's incredible.
That's the thing, like Buster Keaton.
So he was part of that big movement of silent comedy that came out with Harold Lloyd and
Charlie Chaplin.
But this is a guy who, born in 1895, basically from the get-go, literally from birth, was
into physical comedy because he basically did, I mean his parents were both in Vorderville
and he was on the side of the stage every single night, jumping in on their act.
And he used to go on stage and his parents just used to throw him across the stage.
So he was known as the human mop or Mr. Black and Blue or the little boy who can't be damaged.
People would be so concerned.
It sounds like a misery memoir title, the little boy who can't be damaged, it really
does.
But in those days, it was entertainment.
Well, there was a lot of questions about the fact of whether or not there was abuse
from his dad as a result of this.
He always claimed there never was, but a lot of people said, yeah, but come on, you were
chucking your son around the stage.
But he went on stage at the age of one day old.
Yeah, well, you both say, yeah, that was a story.
There were lots of stories that they kind of put across because they were a mother and
father and child sort of group of three.
And there are lots of amazing stories about things that happened in their early days.
I know the one that you're thinking of.
Well, yeah, one, for instance, where he caught his forefinger in a clothes ringer, lost the
first joint, then gashed his head near the eye with a brick that boomeranged after he
threw it on a peach tree.
And then on the same day, he was sucked out of an upstairs window by a passing cyclone
that carried him through the air and deposited him in the middle of the street a few blocks
away.
Yeah.
And that was supposedly the story for why he started going on stage.
It's mostly.
And that's all one day, isn't it?
That's all one day.
It's in it.
I've got his autobiography here.
It's called My Wonderful World of Slapstick and that is an entry in it.
He said, I had rolled and revolved about a block from the farmhouse when a man saw me,
rushed out, scooped me up and carried me to safety of the nearest stormseller, a pretty
strenuous day, as anyone will admit, but superb conditioning for my career as the human mop.
So my question is, when you read that in someone's autobiography, do you think, well, it's in
the autobiography, so it must be true, or do you think maybe the rest of the stuff in
this autobiography isn't true?
True.
I believe it's all true.
No, I think it was 20 months old.
Yeah.
At that point, we should say.
No, exactly.
I think it includes in this book that he was named Buster after he fell down a staircase
and Harry Houdini, who was in a partnership with his family, saw that and said, you know,
they named him Buster, basically, off the back of that.
There's so much literature to say that that wasn't the case.
I love the dates work out.
Yeah.
The dates work out.
They were in a show with Houdini.
Oh, they definitely were in a show with Houdini and the thing is, is that he knew Houdini
as he was growing up.
There's stories in this book of him hanging out with him and going to shops and stuff
when he was a bit older and when they could converse.
So, you know, he claims it's true, but there was a newspaper report that claimed it was
a guy called George Purdy and that was published, you know, in Buster's early life and so it
predates it.
And that's from his dad giving the story.
If you've been in showbiz your whole life, then you're going to have a few little stories
about you, aren't you?
Exactly.
What's amazing is it turns out from reading this book that Buster Keaton is the Brian
Blessed of American Hollywood.
Every story is just unbelievable.
I think that it looks like the best biography of him is by a woman called Marion Mead, who
mainly I love it because I love her.
She did a biography of Dorothy Parker that's amazing, but she had a lovely line which was
something like he layered the stories upon the myths of his life like layers of a lasagna
or something.
But she did look into his life and looked into the stuff that happened at his early age
and it was very violent.
So she said by age two his brushes with death had included near incineration, suffocation,
fools, mutilation and natural calamities.
And there was one time when his parents kept him in a suitcase backstage and at one point
a stagehand walked by, thought someone's left that suitcase open, shot it and they came
out at the end of the night and found that he had almost suffocated, but he was fine.
And then that suitcase kind of came in useful afterwards, didn't it, because they took the
handle and they put it on his back, attached it to his clothes and they would hold on to
the suitcase handle and throw him across the stage.
They used to just, like there's stunts, they'd throw him across the stage, they used to drop
him into the orchestra pit when he was like two onto a bass drum, like his dad once apparently
threw him at a heckler.
We're thinking about doing that to you on the next live tour, we all get together.
But then the father would get arrested according to Buster Keaton, he said they would get
arrested every other week or rather his old man would get arrested and the police would
basically come over and say, why are you abusing your son?
And then they would kind of look at Buster Keaton and see if he had all bruises and stuff
and he didn't apparently because he could fall so well and so they kind of let them
off every time.
It was, it's weird when you read about him because you find yourself on the side of
Buster Keaton against the first ever child protective agency because, and you wonder
if you're reading it right, it was the Jerry Society, it was the first ever you know protection
of children organization in the world, it had just been set up and it was chasing down
these people who it did seem like were abusing their son, but he remembers them as complete
bogeymen.
Wow.
And the thing about them that's kind of interesting is they were set up by Elbridge Jerry, who
was the grandson of Vice President Elbridge Jerry, from where we get the word.
Jerry Mandarin.
Jerry Mandarin.
Really?
Yeah, he's the guy who first fingered around with the districts.
Oh, sorry.
I was about to ask what that means but I understand now.
How rude.
It's where they change the shape of the districts to mean that your voters are in a place where
you want them to be.
But another interesting thing about the Jerry Society is that they were started when there
was a church worker called Etta Agnalwila and she'd noticed that a child was being mistreated
and she wanted to try and get someone to help this child but there was no one to help them
and she realized that there was no charity that was there to look after children.
But there was an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and she's
like, how can we have a charity for cruelty to animals but not cruelty to children?
And so she went to the person who was in charge of the American Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals and said, why don't you set up a children's charity and that's
what they did.
So actually, the children's charity grew from the animals charity.
Really?
I thought you were going to say they reclassified children as animals for the benefit of the
protection.
You know the really famous, I mean the really, really, really famous stunt is where the house
falls on him, around him and there's a window which falls exactly in the right place that
it lands around him.
He had two inches of clear on either side of him for that stunt.
It's just incredible.
I can't believe they made it work.
And he supposedly was nailed to the ground.
I can't quite believe that.
He was nailed to the ground.
His shoes were nailed to the ground to keep him exactly on the right mark so that's where
the window is going to fall.
I watched that scene yesterday and I'm sure he walked away.
The shot changes.
I believe the shot changes and then he leaves.
But maybe, I mean, possibly it doesn't that I'm wrong.
Yeah.
No, I think you would go with nailing to the ground because you can't look up and check
because otherwise that ruins the scene.
But I wouldn't want to be nailed to the ground if they're going to drop the house as in you
might think...
Once it hits you, there's not much you can do about it.
Yeah, that's true.
Surely you'd want to be nailed to the ground rather than risk getting your boots on and
then thinking, oh god, did I just accidentally step to the left of it?
Yeah, exactly.
So, he was very, very successful for a very long time, had a lot of money and he used
to invest in real estate and so on.
One of the things he invested in was a yacht and he was very proud of this yacht and one
day he was going through troubles in his marriage.
He went to take his yacht out and he tried to sink it to end it all, but unfortunately
he was using the damn fino.
No, he went to try and take the yacht out and the sort of boat master or the person
who sort of looks after it said, I'm sorry, you can't, it's only your wife who can take
it out and she's told me not to let you.
And he suddenly discovered that their marriage had fallen apart and they were getting basically
a divorce.
So, he lost his yacht.
So, in retaliation, he bought himself what he called the land yacht.
Do you guys read about the land yacht?
No.
I read a one-line reference to it, but I didn't find it anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I read into it.
He bought a land yacht, which basically he dressed as a captain and he used to drive
around and he would go to all sorts of, like he would go to hotels and he'd make a scene
of it by saying, we're going to rent out a room, but actually we're just going to rent
out a car park space and we'll stay in our land yacht.
Is it like a big sort of vehicle that looks like a yacht?
Yeah, it's basically a big bus that had been converted into what was known as a land yacht.
It does sound awesome on one level, but on the other, he is after divorce sleeping in
his car.
There are two ways of looking at the situation.
He did say, I had as much fun with my land yacht as a man can whose purpose is to forget
his whole private world has fallen apart.
So, yeah, it was not a good time for him.
But then he ended up in a sanitarium, didn't he?
Yeah.
And he was in a straight jacket, but unfortunately, it's very hard to keep someone in a straight
jacket if they're friends with Harry Houdini, so he just got him straight out.
Yeah.
Was he really in a straight jacket?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the Harry Houdini thing is, I think, falls into the, of course, the Buster Keaton
and the tornado.
Yeah.
The great tales.
But he ran away, didn't he, and he got married to the nurse who was looking after him at
the time.
While he was still married to the original life.
Yes.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, he was very drunk all the way through this time.
Well, that's fair enough then.
He might have said, that was very big of me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That'll be another one of those mishearing jokes.
That would have worked brilliantly on a silent film.
And his later years, he mostly did TV adverts, and his grandchildren didn't know him from
any of his films.
They knew him as the singing puppet advertising Alka Selzer on TV.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
But he loved it.
He would turn up and do the adverts and then go away again.
And other silent stars like Charlie Chaplin, I don't think, did Telly.
They thought it was beneath them.
They hated Telly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he did Limelight, which is one of the great silent comedy scenes, because it's in the
talkies at this point, and it's two old men, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, coming
together to do a routine on a vaudeville stage.
And it's just such a beautiful moment, because Buster Keaton still wasn't making movies.
And Chaplin gave him this moment again to sort of shine, which was really, really wonderful.
Because Chaplin, I think, also felt like all of those silent stars, they sort of became
much less famous very, very quickly during the talkies and then had his big renaissance.
So he did get Buster Keaton to have a slightly happy ending.
He got an honorary Oscar in the late fifties, I think.
And all of his films were re-shown in the fifties and sixties and film buffs were suddenly
like, this is genius.
And Chaplin as well got, I think he was put up for an honorary Oscar in seventies and
the early seventies.
Yeah.
And when he was told about that, he said, God, does anyone even remember who I am?
Wow.
Well, because he'd been exiled to Sweden or somewhere like that.
Exiled.
Yeah.
He got kicked out of America.
Chaplin had a huge period for...
What for?
Being a commie.
Yeah, communist.
You're kidding.
Yeah, yeah.
I think he left on a holiday and was told he couldn't come back.
Wait, what's black and white and red all over?
Charlie Chaplin.
Charlie Chaplin.
Very good.
I can't find that.
That's great.
Stop the broadcast.
That's a clue to who's sponsoring us this week.
It's Russia.
We're sponsored by Russia.
No, we're not really.
We are sponsored this week by Babel.
Yes.
Indeed.
Babel are the amazing language learning company that can teach you all the words you need
to know in Spanish, in French, in Italian, in German, in another eight languages, including
Russian.
That's right.
It's so much fun learning a language.
You feel like you have another entire identity when you do.
And a lot of us learn languages in school and we may not have thrived or enjoyed it
at the time, but now if you travel, when you get to travel, it's so much fun to try the
local language and express yourself in there and learn all the weird quirks.
Babel is the perfect way to do it.
They have 15 minute lessons.
You can learn it on the go.
It's practical.
It's built with real world conversations in mind.
Yeah.
It's a really, really good app.
I do use it myself.
And I think, Andy, you've used it to brush up on your German.
Yeah.
Das ist gar.
Das ist gar?
Well, I think I might have said that as a garfish.
The point is that I'm near the beginning of that journey.
You can start your journey by going to babel.com.
That's B-A-B-B-E-L.com forward slash play.
If you go there and use the promo code FISH, then you can get six months free with a purchase
of a six month subscription.
Ja, nur geradeaus nehmen Sie die erste Straße links und du bist am Babel.
B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash play und enter in Sie die offer code FISH and you'll get an extra
six months free.
That was genuinely really, really impressive.
Prudelscheite podcast.
Auf mit dem Podcast.
Auf mit dem.
No, never mind.
OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.
My fact this week is that in 1993, America learned that Kazakhstan had enough uranium
to make 24 nuclear bombs when a US diplomat's car mechanic tried to sell it all to him.
Oh, my God.
It's very cool.
It's like, you know, you get your car done and they're always like, what do you want,
your wheel trims doing?
Or do you want this doing?
It's upselling.
Yeah, it's major upselling.
And he bought it as well.
So this was a guy called Andy Weber, and he was sort of in charge of defence and nuclear
programmes under Obama, but in the 80s he was working at the US Embassy in Kazakhstan
and his car mechanic, who was also kind of a fixer and all-round wheeler dealer kind
of guy, basically said to him, too fancy some uranium.
And so this guy called the US government and said, look, this bloke's just offered me a
bunch of uranium and they didn't believe him.
But eventually he had a series of meetings and was set up with other people to lead him
to the uranium.
And he met with this general, this Kazakh general, who just slipped him a bit of paper
which said, U-235, as in the uranium that can make a nuclear bomb, 90% 600 kilos.
So for comparison, the Hiroshima bomb used 64 kilos of 80% in rich uranium.
OK.
It was hardcore stuff.
And so what did he do with this uranium when he bought it?
Well, it just kept in his back pocket, useful for a rainy day.
No, he, he told the US government and they chatted to the President of Kazakhstan and
they agreed that the US should take it in case Iran got it, basically.
Same old fears.
And so he was taken to it and shown it and it sounds incredible.
He went to this warehouse, basically, and he found it all in buckets and the buckets
were spaced apart.
So they were on this big table and they were spaced apart because if you have uranium too
close together when it's that highly enriched, it does create a massive nuclear explosion.
So it literally spaced apart to avoid criticality issues.
Oh my God.
Isn't that terrifying?
What if you've got a small table?
It was, he did specify it was a very big table.
Must have been a very big table, 600 kilos in buckets.
Yeah, it's quite heavy, I think.
Maybe they had a few trussle tables, that kind of thing.
They probably set up some, yeah, trussle tables.
Yeah, pushed them together.
The extraction process was pretty amazing.
You had to carry it in a really large plane.
So it was some of the largest planes in the world that were sent over from America to
Kazakhstan to pick it up.
There was this tiny...
Is that because it has to be kept at a certain distance from itself?
I think it has to be kept at a distance.
Yeah, and I think there are actually four planes.
It's a big table.
Wow.
Now you can now turn down your in-flight tables.
Why not just take them in separate, like do a bunch of trips?
Well obviously, more likely of problems if you take them on loads of flights.
If you take them on one flight, hopefully nothing goes wrong.
It's like that old saying, put all your eggs in one basket.
Yeah.
There was four baskets.
It was all uranium and it was four baskets, slash planes.
And then they weren't allowed to fly over any countries,
because basically they're carrying this massive nuclear bomb.
I think Kazakhstan is landlocked.
So yeah, they had to get to the nearest sea possible.
So they had to literally jump from like Caspian Sea over hardly any land.
And because of that, it ended up being the longest flight ever that the US had done.
And they had to do loads of in-flight refuelling,
because obviously they didn't have enough fuel to do this massively long flight.
So they were taking such a roundabout route.
What about for four planes?
For four planes, yeah.
What a nightmare.
Yeah, hell.
That's a nightmare situation.
You wouldn't want to be project manager on that, obviously.
Obviously.
It's not a very can-do attitude that Andy, I don't think.
What you really need to be doing is,
OK, guys, this is what we're going to do now.
Oh, God, this sounds hard, doesn't it?
It's what I was podcasting and not in nuclear material, that's personal.
Have you guys heard about the missing Nazi uranium cubes?
This is amazingly cool.
That's like an Indiana Jones fly.
It genuinely is. It's amazing.
So Berlin was working on nuclear fission in the late 1930s.
Lots of people were working on it at the time, obviously,
because it would have been a big advantage.
And the German scientists made this really weird cube nuclear reactor,
which was 664 cubes of uranium all hanging up near each other,
I guess, from the kind of reaction that Anna was talking about.
So it was not a proper reactor in the way that we'd understand it,
but it was all uranium.
And when the Allies invaded, they took the cubes,
which the German scientists, as they left,
had tried to hide by burying in a field.
So the Allies had to dig up these cubes and take them away.
And it was a chaotic attempt to get hold of them.
So in April 1945, there was a retreating military truck
with the cubes on them and a bunch of boys
in a town called Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Oh, yeah.
They nicked a load of the cubes and discovered
that when you threw them, they would spark when they hit the ground.
And so they just were chucking around uranium.
You know what? I've been to Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Have you?
Yeah, I have.
And when we went there, it was Christmas time
and there was a big sort of marketplace.
Yeah.
And there were a load of kids and they had these little cap things
and they kept throwing them on the floor genuinely.
No way.
Yeah, yeah.
That's really, that's bizarre.
You probably should have confiscated those.
But lots of them are missing now.
No, I think I do suspect there is loads of this stuff still lying around.
Even though everyone claims weapons, inspectors, blah, blah, blah.
They've sorted it out.
I mean, there's no way.
Hands, blicks, his ears keep running around now.
Get back on it, blicks.
What are you doing?
In the 90s, there were US inspectors in Russia
who were basically saying Russia was full of these warehouses
that had little bits of uranium in them.
He said there was one warehouse stuffed with very highly enriched uranium
and it was locked with a bit of rope and a wax seal,
which I've opened wax seals on the occasional fashion letter
and it's not difficult.
That's really raising a few more questions than it's answered.
Who's sending you wax sealed letters, Emma?
I exchanged letters with the past.
Are you going out with a count from the 17th century or something?
We send wax seal.
Do you?
Yeah, we do, yeah.
Polina uses wax seal a lot.
Really?
James and I always correspond that way.
That's why we find that when the podcast, he has to write to me.
What does she use them for?
Just kind of cool, like, cool seal.
Well, she just thinks it's cool in Instagrammy.
So you have your own, like, harken seal that goes on it.
I can't remember.
She has her own seal, but I don't think it's a harken seal.
Right.
Yeah, that's very cool.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, no, I agree with you
because it was all paper trail, wasn't it, back then?
And we've lost the paper.
We don't know where stuff is.
50% of this podcast use wax seals.
That should be the headline fact.
It's got to be unproportional.
And it's not you.
I mean, that's insane.
Yeah, but like Dan says, it was kind of paper trails.
And they basically relied on, they just had fences.
They had ropes.
They might have had the odd wax seal,
but mostly it was just intimidation
that stopped people from stealing this stuff.
It was basically like, with a secret police,
you better not steal it because you know what will happen.
And that's basically their only kind of way
of stopping people from stealing stuff.
But the problem was that if you lost any uranium,
you're getting so much trouble,
people just kept it off the books.
And so that's the reason we don't really know
how much of anything there was.
Interesting.
Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't want to be reporting that
back to Stalin, would you?
No, man.
Of course not.
I've lost a bomb.
And Britain, third nuclear power,
and you don't hear that much about us, do you?
And also in this year, the UK has raised
the number of nukes that we have,
which didn't get in the news that much,
but we've gone up from the previous cap of 225,
our cap is now 260.
So in a world where like ostensibly, at least,
we're saying, let's get rid of all the nuclear weapons,
I think there's a lot of re-arming happening
around the world at the moment.
Wow, that's very interesting.
I mean, it doesn't feel like those extra 45
are going to make all the difference
in one way or the other.
No.
Like, if you can think of 220 places to attack
and you still want 45 more, I don't know.
I mean, it's what your priority is at.
Cause what, America and Russia are going to have
what, about 6,000 each, 10,000 each, something like that.
So our extra 40.
Might make all the difference in that war.
40 more than Australia have.
I think, you know, it's not necessarily,
you don't have to go fighting the big boys.
Well, I think that the idea is not to fight anyone.
I think the idea is-
Fight, fight, fight.
Please God, no.
I think most people think the idea is a deterrent.
Yeah, I think welcome to the very confusing Cold War
philosophy of mutually assured destruction,
which obviously didn't make any sense at all.
But yeah, we've got enough to destroy the universe.
But 17% of British electricity comes from nuclear sources.
So I say, well done.
You know, do you?
The positive spin.
Yeah, me too.
It's not weapons grade though.
Not weapons grade.
No, no, no, no, no.
But Sellefield nuclear power station
is obviously one of the places where it's generated.
And Sellefield's a really interesting place.
They have their own magazine, which I didn't know.
How interesting.
How often is that issued?
That's not a weekly magazine, is it?
It is weekly, but every week,
there are half as many pages as in the previous week.
But that's not all that Sellefield has, Dan,
because I sense you're being skeptical
that that's the most interesting thing.
I'm just surprised you opened it.
What's coming next?
They've got a freezer full of Dead Sea Gulls, which is cool.
Because any mammal that dies in Sellefield,
that's our mammals.
No.
All right.
Three seagulls.
If animals go into Sellefield
and they get too close to the nuclear stuff,
then they are considered hazardous,
radioactively hazardous.
And so that can be a gateway to poison the wider area,
because obviously you've got these radioactive seagulls
flying off, creating mayhem.
So they're considered putrassant nuclear waste.
This was reported in 2010.
They had 350 birds and small mammals in their freezers.
That's quite a big freezer.
Yeah, it is.
They'll keep you going in a lockdown.
Yep.
That's quite a big freezer, as far as what?
That's the most interesting fact about that story.
Picture the freezer.
You didn't want me to be interested in project management
before.
No, when I show an interesting freezer, I'm back to page.
Just on nuclear bombs and the hazards of them,
America seems to be a bit clumsy with those sometime.
We've read a few stories where you think, Jesus,
you guys got lucky there, really.
So in 1961, there was a plane, and it had a mid-flight
situation where all the pilots had
to jump out of the plane, evacuate ejector seat out of it,
and the plane actually crumbled in the air.
And two nuclear bombs dropped from it over North Carolina.
And they should have gone off, basically.
But they found one of the bombs hanging
from a parachute off a tree.
And they looked at it, and basically for this bomb
to go off, four things needed to be activated on it.
So it's a forward-tier system.
Three of those had been activated in the process of it
going down, but the fourth didn't go off for some reason.
As none of them should have gone off, should they?
And yet, somehow, three of these extreme safety triggers
had just gone, yeah, we're ready to go.
That's why you have four, I guess.
Oh, my god.
But if it went off, each of them had 253 times the power
that the little boy bomb had that was dropped over Hiroshima.
Can you imagine?
Just one thing didn't go off.
It's kind of mind-boggling.
We had one in Britain as well in the 50s, didn't we,
in Lake and Heath air base in Suffolk.
That was a plane crashed into a nuclear weapons storage
facility.
It was a miracle that the bombs didn't explode.
But if they had, we probably would have lost Cambridge.
Wow.
It was a US official.
Noxford Boy, and he's looking happy.
No great loss.
One US official said it's possible that parts of Eastern
England would have become a desert.
Wow.
We only found out about this way, way later.
But when we look back, the reports
said that there was a mass panic when they realized
this has happened.
And when the fire services were going towards Lake and Heath,
all they saw was a convoy of Americans just legging it out.
Just cars full of people just panicking and people getting
taxis and just saying, take me anywhere away from here
as quickly as you can.
Would you take on that taxi ride as a cab driver?
I think I'd say, do you know what?
You're a little bit out of my zone, actually.
I might put a surge charge on for sure.
It is just unbelievable nothing ever happened.
My god, we got lucky.
There's so many cock-ups.
In 1983, there was this other one,
which was when in the Soviet Union,
there was a computer malfunction, which
meant that the guy on duty, Stanislav Petrov,
basically received information that the US was launching
a missile strike on the USSR at that very moment.
And he was under very strict orders
that he should tell his superiors,
and they would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike.
And so he watched the siren go off
and go, like, strike, strike, strike.
And it said, this is actually 100% reliable information
we've got.
A second siren, a third, a fourth, a fifth went off.
And he, for some reason, decided not to tell his superiors,
thought, I do know why.
I think that something's gone wrong here.
And he said the only reason he kind of thought that
was because the system was too certain.
And he thought it had to pass 28 or 29 security levels
to be totally sure that there was a strike.
And he was like, I'm not even sure it would do that
if there was a strike.
So he didn't report it.
20 minutes went by.
Nothing happened.
So he thought, OK, it was a computer cock up.
But he was the only civilian person who was.
That's a stressful 20 minutes.
Not even the best episode of Frasier
could take your mind off that.
OK, it's time for fact number three, and that is James.
OK, my fact this week is that frog hopper insects
can shoot their urine away from their body
20 times their own body length.
If they didn't do that, they'd probably drown
in their own piss.
Well, good for them that they developed this.
Bad for frog hopper toilet makers, I guess.
Yeah.
20 times is quite far, though.
So quite, is it how?
Yeah, give us more.
How would that work?
120 feet for us.
Because they must be pissing a hell of a lot
for it to stack up enough that it could drown.
Well, they all make really, really good points.
So this was an article that I read recently on iflscience.com.
And it was about frog hoppers.
And what they do is they drink sap from trees.
But they drink xylem, whereas most insects drink phloem.
So phloem's got loads of sugar, really easy to get to.
For some reason, they drink xylem,
which is really hard to get to and has very little nutrition.
And because it has so little nutrition,
they have to drink tons and tons and tons and tons of it.
And I don't need to tell you that if you drink lots
and lots of stuff, you need to pee a lot.
So they create loads and loads of urine.
And really, they piss pretty much all the time.
And if they didn't get rid of it somehow,
it's gonna get in the throat.
If they had a throat, did they have a throat?
Let's not discuss whether they have throats on that.
Anyway, so what they've come up with
is a bum-mounted catapult.
What happens is they can urinate out of their bodies
and this catapult fires the liquid away
about 10 centimetres away,
which might not sound that far,
but they're only about five millimetres in length.
Okay, so cool.
But if you're parked at that exact distance
from another of these frog hoppers,
it's effectively a war, isn't it?
You're sort of drowning each other in battle.
What would you do?
Would you move?
I guess you'd move.
You'd step to the side.
Yep, we'll solve that.
And then having to go to all of this effort,
I think just because they didn't
pay attention in GCSE biology,
the xylem carries the water,
the phloem carries the sugars.
You idiots.
Exactly.
I mean, why are they doing it?
But the amount of urine that they produce,
particularly when they're babies, they're nymphs,
they produce between 150 and 280 times
their own body weight in urine every single day.
Every single day.
It's so gross.
It's nuts.
So I was talking to Ethan, one of the elves about it.
So I weigh roughly 80 kilograms, roughly that.
So that would be me producing 22,400 liters of urine a day.
That's what they do.
So basically 74 bathtubs worth of urine.
Wow, is that full baths?
Full baths, yeah.
Gosh.
74 bathtubs full of urine.
An arresting image.
Where do you get that many bathtubs?
You'd have to go to a showroom.
You'd have to go to John Lewis.
They won't be happy about it.
They see you coming.
Oh no, here's Dan.
Here's Pissy Shriver.
Oh, frog coppers.
Frog coppers are amazing.
They're amazing.
Like Hannah said, they're stupid
because they suck out xylem,
which is really hard to suck out.
It's not only got no nutrition,
it's really hard to suck out.
So it means they have to be really, really good at sucking.
Oh yeah.
They've got record breaking sucking powers, haven't they?
Biggest suckers in nature.
I think 80 times more powerful than an elephant sucks, I think.
I mean, yeah.
They're incredible jumpers as well.
Their jumping is extraordinary.
So they can get to the heights of 70 centimeters,
and they're only six millimeters long.
So that's a huge jump.
And what's amazing is that they use their back legs
in order to do the jumping,
but the back legs are basically specialized
to be used for that.
So when they're walking around normally,
they're just dragging them along, not being used.
They're just sort of coming along,
and then as soon as they wanna jump,
they cock them into position,
and then just fling themselves.
That is amazing.
They can sometimes ratchet up the strength
in their back legs.
So they kind of prepare a jump in advance,
and then they don't jump.
See what I mean?
They have a locking mechanism in their legs,
which means they can keep the potential energy high.
So they are a coiled spring,
and then they just walk around on their front four legs
and drag along these heavily loaded back legs with them
so they can make a getaway, I guess.
And then they exert massive amounts of G-force
on themselves, don't they?
When they go flying through the air.
So they exert a G-force of over 400 G.
That's what they generate when they jump up.
And for comparison, an astronaut who goes into orbit
gets G-force of about five G.
And so that's a lot.
If it was a human, we wouldn't survive.
And five G is very bad for you, isn't it?
Sorry.
Gives you COVID?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've been watching a lot of David Ike stuff.
So people might know frog hoppers as well as spittle bugs,
another name for them.
And that's because if you ever walk out in the countryside
in the middle of spring,
you might see little bubbles of spit
on bits of grass or bits of plants.
And that is made by these frog hoppers.
And basically they eat all of this xylem stuff
into their body, and then they poo it out
into little bubbles.
And then those kind of bubbly poos
is where their children live.
It's a beautiful start in life.
Well, they're just lucky to have, you know,
the bank of mum and dad, these kids to rely on.
But they're sort of suffocated in there.
So they've got to like shove a little bit
of their abdomen out to breathe in.
Otherwise.
It's a snorkel, basically.
Yeah, it's a snorkel, basically.
Yeah.
It's very weird.
But then if you kind of scare the little baby
as you're going past,
I don't know how you would do it, I guess.
Boo!
That'll do it.
Very easily scared, actually.
It'll kind of retreat into its little bubbly foam nest,
and it'll stop breathing,
and then just hope that the threat goes away,
and then it'll come back out again.
Yeah, I think sometimes they can use them
as emergency oxygen tanks.
So sometimes if you've freed them out,
they'll retreat into the bubbles,
and they'll pierce a few bubbles.
So they bond together into a bigger bubble,
and use it as an emergency tank.
It's really clever, though.
The cookies bit.
It fights predators,
because I think it tastes horrible.
And it also stops the larvae from drying out.
It's come out of their bum, hasn't it?
It's come out of their bum, you know?
Self-respecting predators is not going to have that.
And it stops them from drying out,
but obviously when you then become born,
you don't want to be soft anymore.
You don't want to be wet.
So what do you do?
Well, you blow an extra-large bubble inside of your bubble,
and so more air comes in there,
and then your exoskeleton can dry out,
and then you can come out of the spitty bubble,
and you're fine, and you can be an adult.
That's such amazing creatures.
They really are cool.
Why aren't we learning about these all the time?
Because also, when you walk around the countryside,
I always thought it was sap.
In fact, I'm pretty sure my mum once told me it was just sap.
And I said, why is there
those globules of saliva sitting on all the plants?
My parents always said it was cuckoo spit,
which is what it's called,
but they never went on to say which is made by an insect.
It's possible they hadn't looked into it,
and they hoped you wouldn't inquire further.
I must just say thank you to Claire Harkin.
Not my sister, Claire Harkin,
but another Claire Harkin with the same name,
who is one of the experts on frog hoppers in the UK.
And you can help her by going to her website,
which is spittlebugsurvey.co.uk
if you see any cuckoo spit in the spring.
And the reason is we need to know where these frog hoppers are
because it's possible that they can start spreading disease.
There's a bacteria called xylella,
which originated in South America.
And when they go into the plant to get this xylem,
they also can sometimes put the bacteria into the plant,
and it means that the plants can die.
They basically die of thirst, really.
And if you find this bacteria in a tree,
then all the plants within 100 meters
will need to be destroyed because it's so catching this thing.
In Italy, basically centuries old,
olive groves have had to be kind of wiped out.
Oh, is that what caused the massive olive wipeout?
Some of them, for sure.
Yeah, that was bad.
Oh, frog hoppers, not so great after all.
It's the bacterium's fold.
I guess so, yeah.
So if you do find any cookies fit in your garden,
then go to spittlebugsurvey.co.uk
and let them know where it is, and then we can test it.
And we should say we think the bacteria is not in the UK yet.
But so if you find cookies fit in your garden,
don't destroy 100 meters around everything.
It's just important to report the presence of it
so it's known where it is.
I spoke to Claire Harkin and she sent me loads of it.
Yeah, loads of the material I've got for this came from her.
I said from one Harkin to another,
can you send me all of your frog hopper stuff, please?
I really hope in the future, all your emails get mixed up
between what you're meaning to send to your sister
and what you sent to her.
I'm just terrified now,
because I remember the last time something horrible
came to Italy and we said,
but it hasn't come to the UK yet.
That went extremely badly.
Stop the podcast.
Stop the podcast.
Hi, everybody.
We wanted to let you know that this week
we're sponsored by Wondrium.
Yes, Wondrium is formally the Great Courses Plus,
the go-to place to find all of the most amazing lectures
and talks about the world of history, science,
environment, pop culture, bizarre, mad as shit theories.
Those are the ones I go to.
Yeah, it's even got something for Dan,
so it's definitely got something for you.
So many interesting courses on there.
So if you want to learn about the crimes of the century,
for instance, or if you want to learn about Notorious London,
really delve into Jack the Ripper, things like that,
that's great.
I'm currently learning how to be a medieval knight.
Are you?
Of course, on that, I am.
I'm offended you haven't noticed.
How far have you got?
I have won some jousting contests.
I have slaughtered some peasants, it's early days.
I haven't.
So yeah, you can learn that and more
if you go to Wondrium.com.
It's got thousands of hours of amazing video
and audio content and you can download
all their coursebooks alongside that.
So if you go to Wondrium.com, slash fish,
you'll get a free month trial of unlimited access.
That's right, so go to Wondrium.com slash fish,
that's W-O-N-D-R-I-U-M, dot com slash fish,
and you can get that free month trial
of unlimited access immediately.
Okay, on with the show.
On with the show, I haven't really murdered anyone.
On with the show.
Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show,
and that's my fact.
My fact this week is that the person credited
as official consultant about the future
for the movie Back to the Future 2
is the great grandson of H.G. Wells.
Very nice.
Very nice.
Author of?
Author of.
Time machine.
Time machine and War of the Worlds and so on,
but obviously, time machine, very relevant to the movie.
He's not a sort of future writer,
he's not a scientist.
He actually works within the movie world,
so he's a director.
So he's a director of a great childhood
favorite movie of mine, An American Tale,
Five All Goes West.
Yes.
Yeah, he did The Prince of Egypt.
He worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit
when he started his career.
Kung Fu Panda, he worked on.
He worked on.
I'm sorry.
All the greats.
Yeah.
Kung Fu Panda 3.
But no, so he's a big Hollywood guy,
and he got brought on to Back to the Future 2
because he's a big Hollywood guy.
He got brought on to Back to the Future 2,
and he did some consulting about the future.
What's his name?
His name is Simon Wells.
Simon Wells.
Yeah.
H.E. Wells.
Yeah.
What an interesting man.
Oh my goodness.
Incredible futurist and novelist and everything.
You know, he wrote so many classic works.
So he wrote War of the Worlds,
Time Machine as we've said,
The Island of Dr. Moreau,
which is an absolute classic.
The Invisible Man.
I mean, almost all of it was in this really short period
quite soon after he became an author.
He wrote 40 years.
He wrote dozens and dozens of novels and, you know,
hundreds of short stories and all of this.
Yeah, he came up with so much cool stuff.
He came up with Wikipedia long time before it was made.
Yeah.
Which is super fun.
The World Brain.
Yeah, that's a book that he published.
Yes, exactly.
In 1936 was a lecture,
and in 1936 he presented it as The World Brain,
which I think is what we should rename Wikipedia.
And his idea was that it was an encyclopedia
that was constantly changing and alive and maturing
and being revised by Brains from around the world.
And he said, you know,
everyone should be able to refer to this for their knowledge
of everything, schools and colleges
and anyone who needs to fact check anything.
And basically the only difference is that it would be delivered
in the form of reels of microfilm
being dropped on demand from airplanes,
as opposed to...
We might get there.
We might get there in the future.
Fingers crossed.
He thought it would prompt world peace, didn't he?
Yeah.
He thought that if we all had access to the same information,
its creation is a way to world peace, his words.
And he was saying this in 1936.
I think also it depends when you got him
whether you want to take his futurism
because in the early 20th century
he wrote, Anticipations was at massive bestseller
and it was what he thought the future was going to be like
and almost kind of what he thought it should be like
because he'd read a lot of Darwin
and a few other things
and he thought this is the way we should go.
And he thought basically half the population
should enslave the other half of the population.
Oh, whoa!
He thought that racial and social homogeneity
should be enforced.
He thought that certain groups
shouldn't be allowed to have children
and certain groups should be told
that they should have children.
Arthur Conan Doyle said it was vile and villainous.
Any man who knows science and medicine
knows this book is muddle-headed.
Any man who knows humanity knows the book is horrible.
I knew James was going to do this.
George Orwell...
I knew he was going to knock him down.
George Orwell said it was politically naive
and that it was a terrible book as well.
It was a really, really...
like basically a nasty piece of work.
It really, really was.
But as he got older in life
he definitely changed
and in the 20s he started to meet presidents.
He met Theodore Roosevelt.
He even met Lenin as well
and he started trying to talk...
What was the time traveler?
He started trying to talk them into a much better world
and actually in the end
he was probably quite influential
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
that the UN came up with in 1948.
So when he was really young he had all these ideas
which were really quite bad
but then as he got older he kind of mellowed
and he had a much better idea of...
I had never heard of that anticipation thing.
That's extraordinary.
And that would have been after he started writing novels
because I think he started about 1895.
Orwell was a big fan
even though there were disagreements.
He was very mercurial.
He had four things out
with basically all of his mates in the end.
But Orwell basically said that anyone
who had been alive and literate
between 1900 and 1920
was affected by H.G. Wells more than anyone else.
And what a brilliant guy he'd been
but later in his life.
So it seems like he started bad from what James said.
He got extremely good
and then he sort of descended into like literary shitness
a little bit again.
And so Orwell said in the 1930s
now he seems a bit of a shallow inadequate thinker.
But mostly he was saying
but look, I think he was a pretty good guy
and Orwell's just replied to Orwell with a note
saying, you shit.
Wow.
What a great writer.
Such a way with words.
Jumping back to young H.G. Wells
he was actually born from interesting stock.
His dad was a professional cricketer
who was sort of famous in his own right.
So he's a cricketer who took four wickets
in four balls for Kent against Sussex.
Apparently the first time that's ever been done.
Wow.
Yeah, so he was really cool.
That by the way is huge.
Yeah.
It's like for me when I read that
I was like, that should be the headline for that.
That has only happened 43 times
in the history of cricket.
And there's been over 60,000 matches
of first class cricket in history.
And it's only happened 43 times
and he was the first one to do it.
And he was the first one to do it.
Wow.
And one of the people that he got out
was a guy called Spencer Austin Lee
who was the great nephew of Jane Austen.
Wow.
Amazing.
So his father then ran a crockery shop
which sold all of this crockery
and also sold sporting goods
because his great uncle was Timothy Duke
and cricket fans will know the Dukes Ball
which is the cricket ball that English teams use.
And whenever the Aussies come over here
they always complain about the Dukes Ball.
It swings too much and all that kind of stuff.
So he was part of that kind of family.
So they opened this shop
but apparently the location was very poor
and they didn't do very well.
Although today there is a pry mark there
which I have to say does very well indeed.
So I don't know if it was the location or not.
But then I read an article in the Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography which you all know
and it's often quite dry that book.
But they talked about Joseph Wells
who was his father and they said that
he once broke his thigh by falling from a ladder
in his backyard on a Sunday morning
while the rest of the family were at church.
Officially he had been pruning a vine
but local gossip alleged that the church service
ended earlier than usual
and that he was caught helping a lady friend
escape over a back wall.
Oh my god.
What was that about?
Are you sure this wasn't a Buster Keaton film?
Anna, you'll think about him writing to...
Who was it?
Orwell.
Orwell saying you shed.
He was quite good at grudges and rivalries.
So the War of the Worlds came out
in I think about 1895 or 6
and obviously huge success.
It was serialized as was common then.
Really popular, right?
It was illustrated by an artist called Warwick Goebel
and Goebel's vision of the tripods
was these kind of ovoid pods
standing on the metal beams
and Welles hated it so much, right?
He hated this illustration so much
that when the first collected version of the book
was released, not serialized,
he added some new material
and halfway through the book
he's in the middle of describing a blasted planet earth
and you know, it's in the middle of a full war
and he describes the first pamphlets
to give a consecutive account of the war
so he's writing about a text within the fictional story.
He said, the artist had evidently made a hasty study
of one of the fighting machines
and there his knowledge ended.
He presented them as tilted stiff tripods
without either flexibility or subtlety
with an altogether misleading monotony of effect.
The pamphlet containing these red rings
had a considerable vogue
and I mentioned to him simply to warn the reader
against the impression they may have created.
Inside the next edition.
So good, so good.
I think that's incredibly unprofessional.
That would ruin my enjoyment of a book
if suddenly the author stepped out of it
to bitch about his illustration.
No, I'm into that.
Another thing he would have hated
while we're on things that he hated
would have been his great-grandson's credit in the movie.
Why?
Because he didn't like credits.
He didn't think credits should be part of movies.
So in 1936 he wrote a movie called Things to Come
and one of the things he tried to eliminate
from the movie was the credits
because he thinks all movies shouldn't have them.
He thought instead when you were sitting watching the film
little booklets should come round and be handed out
that would have the credits of the movie in them.
That's a great idea.
Yeah, a nice idea.
No, it's not.
You pause the film at various moments
to check your booklet and see who the casting director was.
Not during the film, I guess,
but I've often wanted some explanatory notes
at the end of a film.
You know what it's a bit like,
which I think is a really good idea.
You know, if you go to the theatre to watch a comedy show,
it's like having a programme, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think if I was to go and watch a podcast,
do a live show, maybe later this year,
I probably would buy the programme if the film was won.
It'd have to be very well written
and full of interesting jokes
and lots of behind-the-scenes photos.
And yeah.
I wouldn't buy it.
Just one other thing,
just to show his influence on this movie,
there was an actor in it called Ernest Thessinger,
and all the scenes that he was in were shot.
And then Wells decided,
Matt, I don't like him.
Let's get a new actor.
So they reshot it with a guy called Cedric Hardwick,
but they didn't tell Ernest Thessinger,
who showed up to the premiere,
sat down and discovered he wasn't in the movie.
That's a good prank.
He should have read the little booklet
even before it started.
He would have known.
You'd have a breakdown.
You'd have some kind of psychotic break.
Yeah, you'd think you were going insane, wouldn't you?
Yeah, of course.
You'd think you'd invented a memory.
Someone is on screen with someone else's face
saying your lines to an actor you'd filmed a scene with.
Yeah.
Yeah, you'd end up in the asylum.
Gosh.
His skin smelt of honey and ball nuts.
Okay.
What a great...
Lovely.
How do we know?
One of his lovers said so,
and he had many lovers.
Oh, good.
We're getting to the sexy bit of A.T. Wells.
This is the juice.
Yeah, he was a great womanizer,
and he wrote one...
No, the adjective great in that
usually isn't said the way that you said it.
Sorry.
He was an esteemed and wonderful womanizer.
There was actually a lovely Great Lives on Radio 4.
It was from 2001,
and it was, I don't know if you remember
Humphrey Carpenter who was hosting it.
Yeah, and he was interviewing Faye Weldon,
the author,
and she mastered about 70 at the time,
and she loves A.T. Wells.
And Humphrey Carpenter said,
so would you have slept with him
if you'd lived at the same time?
And she just said,
I daresay I would.
Wow.
Yeah, he claimed to have an open marriage right,
but it sort of sounded like he had the open marriage,
and his wife had no choice but to be in an open marriage.
Well, he had a few marriages, didn't he?
First was to his cousin,
and second was not to his cousin, I believe.
But what he said was,
he wanted encounters with, I'm quoting here,
free, ambitious, self-reliant women
who would mate with me and go their way.
Was that in his newspaper, Adam?
Exactly.
Nonsmoker preferred.
Can I tell you a woman that was a bit like that,
his final partner in life,
who was Maurer Budberg.
Now, she was a Russian
whose first husband was murdered in the October Revolution.
She later married Maxim Gorky,
who is like the great author,
and she was almost certainly a double agent
between Britain and the USSR.
One MI5 informant said of her,
she can drink an amazing quantity,
mostly gin.
She sounds absolutely amazing,
and her older half-sister
is someone called Alexandra Ignatieva Zakharovskaya,
and she was the great-grandmother
of a certain Nick Clegg.
Oh!
Whoa, that is the sexiest thing
I've ever heard about Nick Clegg,
which I know is not such a competition.
Yeah, she was super cool,
although Virginia Woolf used to call her Bedbug,
I think, nice play on her name,
which was harsh, but she was like...
She was everywhere, Virginia Woolf.
I know, she had her things in a lot of pies.
Comment on everyone? Yeah.
She liked to comment, it was kind of her game.
But yeah, old Bedbug, or Maurer Budberg,
she dated loads of cool people,
she dated Maxim Gorky,
she dated Robert Bruce Lockhart,
who tried to assassinate Lenin,
whilst also spying on him.
He gets everywhere,
and a finger in a lot of pies at John Lenin, did he?
Sorry, Anna, can you break that down for me?
Robert Bruce Lockhart tried to assassinate Lenin,
while also spying on him.
No, sorry.
Lockhart tried to assassinate Lenin,
and this woman, Budberg,
was totally in love with Lockhart,
but also spying on him for Russia.
So, she was all over the place.
She had a gold laundering scheme
in the 1920s, I think,
and then there was a massive house fire
that destroyed all papers and files about her.
How convenient.
But she kept turning wells down, didn't she?
I think he proposed lots of times to her.
They never married, they were a kind of
life partners at the end.
Because there's a theory that she was pretending
to be in love with him, certainly at the start,
to gain access to his large circle of friends,
because if she was a Soviet double agent,
she was a very useful man to know.
Except that he kept falling out with all of his friends,
which must have really pissed her off.
Another person Wells had an affair with
was a novelist called Elizabeth von Arnim,
who is very cool.
She is a really great
20th century novelist.
Her works are highly recommended,
but he came in through a hidden entrance,
apparently, to her gaff.
And they went at it so hard
that they broke her hotel bed twice.
Oh my God!
That feels like too much information.
That's from his memoirs, alright?
Is it? Yeah, sorry.
It's just the way you worded it, I think.
They went at it so hard.
He wrote two autobiographies, one of them was clean
and one of them was dirty, one of them was about his sex life.
Really? And he said, hold this back until
all the women involved are dead.
Andy, can I ask? When they were at this hotel
and they were at it so hard
that they broke their bed,
did the housekeeper then come up
and fix the bed while they're presumably
sat around waiting for that to happen
and then they started having sex again
and broke it again.
I don't know if it was the same night.
What you're questioning is, was it a bad fix of the bed
or was it separate beds?
Is the housekeeper to blame?
What was his trip advice review afterwards?
This book sounds amazing, though.
This book of all his exploits.
I think he was kind of criticised because in his first autobiography
he didn't mention any of his lovers.
But did it come out in his lifetime?
No, he said to his son.
He gave it to his son to edit and publish, which is weird.
Wow, his son could have got in there
with my dad wrote a porno years before, right?
He said, keep this back until all the women are dead.
That meant 1984.
Ironically, for someone who knew George Orwell?
Yeah.
And lots of it was excised.
Lots of details were excised from it.
Probably, you know, bed stuff,
things like that.
Can I just fill the last 20 seconds with another fact?
Yeah.
He basically invented Warhammer.
I'm saying hobby war gaming.
The practice of hobby war gaming he invented.
He invented a thing in 1913 called Little Wars.
It was so much more serious than modern
tabletop war gaming because you had to have
Okay, there are a lot of people listening who are very offended
by the idea that anything is more serious than that.
You had miniature cannons, which you had to fire
at the enemy's soldiers
in this game that H.T. Wells invented.
And this is also a man who had sex with lots of people.
Yeah.
Stop giving people false hope.
I know.
Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things
that we have said over the course of this podcast,
we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.
I'm on at Shriverland, Andy.
At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin.
And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com.
Yep. Or you can go to our group account
no such thing or our website.
No such thing as a fish.com.
All the previous episodes are up there. Check them out.
Also check out our tour dates.
We're back on the road as of October 2021.
And we're going to be playing 26 places
all over the UK and Ireland.
So see if we're coming to a town near you and do come along.
It's going to be awesome. All right.
We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.
Bye.